Judging Books by Their Visual Features: A Case Study of the Three Persian Translations of Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Book-length Essay A Room of One’s Own

Nowadays visual language as the tool of comprehension and communication, is considered very significant andimportant in our contemporary societies. In fact, visual language, as a communicative tool can be used for variousreasons and aims, for drawing people’s attention. In addition, visual language is especially used by writers andtranslators for better and quick understanding the subject and message(s) of their books-when reader tries to take adecision for buying a book. Therefore, visual language like verbal language, encounters with various ideologies. Inthis regard, this study attempted to analyse the textual features, and the cover page design of the Persian translationsof the non-fiction feminist novel (book-length essay), A Room of One’s Own written by Woolf (1995), which weretranslated after the Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979, in order to reveal their ideological implication(s).To do so, this study was conducted based on Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2006) semiotic framework, and Machin’s(2007) model of typographical analysis was also employed in this research. This study as a descriptive, explanatoryand comparative research adopted qualitative method. The findings showed that the feminist ideological loads of theoriginal book were manipulated by the decisions, choices, and selections of the Iranian translators. But, themanipulations and changes, which were done at semiotic level, did not significantly affect the writer’s feministmessages, the subject, and the feminist ideological loads of the English book, A Room of One’s Own. This study maybe good for the translators whom want to choose and select the cover page design and visual features of their booksfor affecting their audiences in a true way.

کلیدواژه ها:

A Room of One’s Own ، Critical Study ، Ideology ، Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2006) Semiotic Framework ، Machin’s (2007) Model of Typographical Analysis ، Manipulation ، Virginia Woolf